post randomly

and thanks to whoever’s link I followed to get there.

Here’s a link for anyone who wants it:

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/default.aspx

VIA Survey of Character Strengths
Here are your scores on the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. For how to interpret and use your scores, see the book Authentic Happiness. The ranking of the strengths reflects your overall ratings of yourself on the 24 strengths in the survey, how much of each strength you possess. Your top five, especially those marked as Signature Strengths, are the ones to pay attention to and find ways to use more often.

Your Top Strength
Forgiveness and mercy
You forgive those who have done you wrong. You always give people a second chance. Your guiding principle is mercy and not revenge.

Your Second Strength
Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.

Your Third Strength
Gratitude
You are aware of the good things that happen to you, and you never take them for granted. Your friends and family members know that you are a grateful person because you always take the time to express your thanks.

Your Fourth Strength
Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
You expect the best in the future, and you work to achieve it. You believe that the future is something that you can control.

Your Fifth Strength
Fairness, equity, and justice
Treating all people fairly is one of your abiding principles. You do not let your personal feelings bias your decisions about other people. You give everyone a chance.

but that does not mean I want the pilot and copilot of my flight to Denver to do the same thing!

In the computer rooms at our college, there is software called SynchronEyes that allows instructors to see what students are doing. For instance, if my students are writing essays, I can look at their work and even make comments from my station at the front of the room.

But the very coolest thing I can do is keep them on task. I never tell them my full powers, But when I see someone on Facebook instead of writing their essay, I just say, from my station at the front, “You know, writing an essay is not the same as posting on Facebook.”

Or, I can hit a teacher control button, type in a different url, and send them to a different site. Since we use a publisher’s website in some classes, I just send them back to that one. They freak out, and for all their technological savvy, they have no idea how I am doing it. One of them asked me if I could tell what other sites she had up on her computer at home if she was on the publisher’s website. I told her my powers did not extend beyond the college.

Technology can be fun.

Just a few of its ups and downs:

1. Saturday, my back hurt so badly that I had to keep Nick in bed, stay on the couch taking Flexeril, only waking up to change Nick’s DVD out every couple of hours. Since then, it has progressively gotten better, with the week’s high point coming yesterday as I became able to pick stuff up off the floor and wash my feet in the shower.
2. Thank gooodness, I was in shape to go to work Monday, since my new second session class had its first meeting then. Good class.
3. Today, when I was getting a class oriented to new software, a total technology meltdown occurred, with only three students getting set up on the site. I spent 25 minutes on hold for tech support, standing in front of the class with my cell phone, and it turned out to be no easy fix. We will try again next week.
4. I went to write a check yesterday and . . . nooooooo . . . I was out and had apparently forgotten to order any.
5. My longtime book editor has received a promotion and is moving on. He was excellent, but I am sure the new guy will be too. (Fingers crossed.)

All I can say is, thank goodness for the weekend coming up!

I went to Kroger today and went to the deli for chicken. Two clerks were ignoring me, but I was walking on eggshells because of the deli debacle on Friday.

Finally, when I was sure one had seen me, I said in a friendly way, “Are you waiting on customers or should I ask the other lady?” I was not about to assume that she was doing the chicken.

She turned to me and said in an agitated way, “What lady? What are you talking about?”

I decided to try again in a different way. “I want to buy some chicken.”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me? You’ve gotta tell me! I didn’t see you! You can’t just stand there! You’ve gotta tell me!”

“I just did.”

“Well, I never heard you. I was making labels for my (something or other). I never heard you. I never saw you. You gotta tell me you’re here, or how am I gonna know?”

“No, I mean I just did. Just now. And there’s really no need to jump down my throat.”

Now, I swear, I was not in the least antagonistic. In fact, I was trying very hard for just the right approach.

However, I did call the manager when I got home. I can’t tell you when I have ever talked to a grocery store manager about anything, but in the last four days, I have talked to two. About deli employees. When all I wanted was chicken.

Should I quit going to grocery stores?
Is this National Get Grief with Your Chicken Month?
Are deli employees secretly gathering and sticking pins in a voodoo doll that looks strangely like me?
Am I in the Twilight Zone?

Jeez.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a call from Nick’s caregiver saying the water in the pool was getting very high from the downpour we were having. She told me what the level was, and I told her it could wait but to keep me posted. I called in about an hour, and she said she had just been getting ready to call me. I told her I would leave work, run by Fresh Market, and come home to take let some water out of the pool.

Traffic is horrible, the water is ankle-deep on the streets, and I wonder if I should just go home, but I press on to Fresh Market. When I get there, I am happy because they have pretty carving pumpkins on sale, and I put a big one in my cart.

I go to the deli and wait and wait. No one is there, but the employees are doing other things and not looking at me. Another lady joins me, and we wait together. Then a man comes up, and suddenly an employee notices and waits on him, without asking who was first. The lady and I look at each other in a can-you-believe-this way, and I say, “I’m going to get the other employee.” So I walk down the counter and call to him, using not my inside voice, not my outside, voice but my auditorium voice and undoubtedly sounding annoyed, “Excuse me, sir, can you help me down here?”

This guy, maybe mid-twenties, just loses it. “No! And you can’t talk to me like that! You have to speak to me RESPECTFULLY!”

Me: I mean no disrespect. I just want some help over here.

Him: It’s not my job! I do the CHEESE! Respect is a TWO WAY STREET! Why can’t you walk over HERE to talk to me?

Me, knowing I am in an alternate universe: Because I am over here. And I am a customer. And your job is to help customers.

Him: Don’t TELL me what my job is. You don’t KNOW what my job is.

All this is taking place at an elevated decibel level in a suddenly quiet store. Fresh Market is a small store, and my Auditorium Voice and Cheese Boy’s Hissy Fit Voice fill it easily. The butcher comes over in his apron and tells the cheese guy to calm down and let it go, that he’s attracting attention.

Cheese Boy: (To butcher) “No! I don’t care!” (To me) And I should have been CLOCKED OUT FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO.

Me: And I shoud care about this?

The exchange is clearly winding down. Cheese Boy takes off his apron and stalks to the back room.

The second deli man, finished with his customer, comes over. “Ma’am, I am so very, very sorry. I apologize. What can I help you with?”

I give him my order. “What’s wrong with Mr. Charm?”

“Well, he’s a little touchy.”

The deli man and the lady who was waiting with me are saying kind and comforting things to me, so I figure I did not come across entirely as Ogre Lady.

I ask to see the manager when I go up to the checkout. In the maybe 30 seconds that it takes the cashier to get him and return, about five employees just happen to find things to do in the immediate area. As I tell the manager an abbreviated version of the story (and trust me, the version here is abbreviated too), I hear the employees saying things like “Gee, I wonder who that was?”

When I end by telling the manager that Cheese Guy is a rude little snotnose, one of the women standing nearby bursts into laughter. The manager says he will take care of it. I thank him.

Before I go, the woman who laughed asks me to tell her one more time what I called the guy. I oblige.

Jerry Seinfeld had his Soup Nazi. Apparently I have the Cheese Nazi.

Was this the end of my woes? No. When I got home, we had a power outage, and I can’t drain the pool without power. When it finally came on, it was dark. I went out in the dark and the rain, and the pool pump would not catch. I had to take the leaf basket out of the intake valve and move a flap that sometimes closes for some unknown reason. While I was doing that, the leaf basket slid into the pool on the wet pavement and sank to the bottom. It is still there.

It was not my afternoon.

and it made me very sad. The two of them have been together for so long and have two grown children and four grandchildren.

Mostly, I was struck with how brave people are, how they go on in the face of impossible personal loss. I talked with O on Monday, and she was as warm and gracious as she always is. She told me how terribly hard it was on her 12-year-old granddaughter, the oldest of the four granddaughters.

I saw that grandaughter at the visitation on Wednesday. Two of her little friends were there to comfort her, and when her mother introduced me to her, she said, so poised, “I have heard so much about you . . . all good.” At twelve, I am sure I would not have handled a grandfather’s death and hordes of strangers half as well.

Loss. It makes me sad. We spend the first part of our lives gaining—we make friends, we gain lovers or spouses, we (sometimes) have children. Then we crest the top of the rollercoater and it’s all downhill. We lose our grandparents, our parents, our health, our spouses, our friends. And we go on, heartbreakingly brave and impossibly strong.

but this morning I thought of something that happened nine years ago and got really angry. At the time it happened, I was dealing with my mother’s imminent death and I think I was too occupied at the time to even let it make a ripple, but now I wish to vent.

When my mother was taken unconscious to the hospital, I left Georgia to travel to Virginia to see about her. First, I called to find out about her condition, and they let me speak to the admitting physician, who told me she was in the neuro ICU. I asked if she could communicate, because that seemed like the most important thing to me. The doctor said, “She’s trying, but she’s communicating inappropriately.” My mother occasionally had a salty tongue, so my natural inference was that she was cursing at them. I said forget inappropriate, I am just glad she is communicating.

When I finally got there and saw her, she was unconscious and not speaking. I asked my aunt what she had said, and my aunt said she had never been conscious or said anything. I told her what the doc had said, and she said, “Well, she was sort of moaning for a while, maybe that’s what the doc meant.”

It flashed on me then: This fricking so-called doctor was using some medical euphemism instead of telling me straight out that my mother was unconsious and could only moan. “Inappraopriate” is a purely social term referring to the acceptability of one’s dress or actions or whatever; if someone can’t communicate, that is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, it’s just a fact. How dare she give me the wrong impression with euphemisms when I am hundreds of miles away!

Then, despite my bringing my mother’s living will and explaining my mother’s wishes to the staff, this doctor decides to insert a feeding tube. I find out about it and say NO. They call Dr. Bitch and give me the phone, and I explain to her that if my mother is dying, it is against her express wishes to have a feeding tube. This so-called doctor fairly SCREAMS at me over the phone, “WHO SAYS SHE”S DYING?” I say, not screaming but with some heat, “No one says it, but I have eyes. Maybe if someone would come and TALK TO ME about it, I could make an informed decision.” (I had been there 2 days and had asked for but not seen a doctor.)

Very soon indeed, a neurologist came by and talked to me about my mother’s condition and said he did not think she would ever regain consciousness, and if she did, she would not be “there.” So I made the decision that my mother and I had discussed many times.

I had not thought about Dr. Bitch in quite a while. And I think it did me good to write about it here. Tears are coming to my eyes and the emotion I did not have time to feel nine years ago is here. F#ck you, Dr. Bitch!

my friend O and her hubby. He is very ill. He had an intestinal fistula and they have had to shut down his digestive system and hope for healing. If that fails, dangerous surgery awaits.

He is in a subacute care hospital where they have one nurse to three patients and constant care. Nick was in the same hospital, and I have never seen a better place for a sick person to be.

So I am doing my shopping, and I pass a woman about my age, and I smile at her because hey, it’s what I do. She smiles back and . . . well, either she had a serious eye tic or she winked at me. All I could think of was the episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond” in which Marie realizes that her giant abstract statue looks like huge ladyparts, and she says, “Oh my god. I’m a lesbian.” I inventoried myself: unfussy hair, denim shirt, gray pants and . . . (Razz, if you are reading, here is the clincher) comfortable shoes!

As I am checking out, the lady behind me helps me unload my cart, and I thank her. As I am about to leave, another lady says to the cashier, “This lady (indicating the nice lady who helped me) is letting me go in front of her.” So I turn to the nice lady and say, “You are really earning your wings today,” meaning, she’s an angel to be so nice. She looks at me with a fishmouthed gape of amazement, and nothing comes out. I smile and say, “Yes, you are,” and get the heck out of Dodge.

New policy: Interact with no one. Check.